Uchronics.

 

   © Photos and Text: M. Antonia García de la Vega

"Uchronics" is a series of portraits of people linked to the world of art and culture that I began to make in 2016, it is made up of 116 portraits, the series has materialized in a book.

The title alludes to this aspect: Uchronic. According to the dictionary of the RAE, is the reconstruction of history on hypothetical data.

It is a work of pictorial inspiration, but made with photographic language. It can be framed, from a contemporary photography perspective, in the fictional portrait and staging, as Rafael Roa points out in his blog review.

To carry out the portraits, I have been inspired by painting, often from the Renaissance, by seventeenth-century painters such as José de Ribera, Velázquez and the Dutch. Also in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, without forgetting the entire photographic tradition of portraiture.

Sometimes the inspiration has been more faithful, other times, however, it has been a complete invention; creating imaginary identities motivated by the model's own personality.

It is in these imaginary falsely historical constructions that that time machine called photography has operated, which gives the full possibility of manifesting itself to an imaginary existence. Furthermore, they open a window of possibility full of certainty to characters who never existed but who could have done so and who discover an unexpected life projected into the past.

Through the gesture, the look and the clothing I have tried to create a series of portraits of characters, from credible pasts but where in the end the true authenticity of the models is imposed, by deliberately making them pose. Through artifice, assumed as such, the subjects reach an inner reality that is more true than natural, as stated by Pepe Ayma in the review published in “El Mundo”.